The present invention relates to air conditioners.
A number of systems have been developed and are in use for cooling rooms used for various purposes ranging from occupant comfort to providing equipment with desired operating environments. Such systems typically include an air conditioner located inside the room, and a heat rejection portion of the system located outside of the room. Chiller systems are examples of such cooling systems, and provide a flow of chilled water from the heat rejection portion of the system to the air conditioner inside the room as a cooling medium. Heat can be rejected from the cooling medium directly to the outside air (so-called “free cooling”), and/or to a secondary cooling medium loop such as a cooling tower loop or a vapor compression system refrigerant loop. In other systems the cooling medium itself can be a flow of refrigerant from a vapor compression system. The air conditioner transfers heat between the relatively hot air inside the room and the cooling medium. After transferring heat between the cooling medium and the air, the cooling medium is returned to the equipment located outside the room to be cooled again.
An example of an application for such air conditioning systems is cooling systems used to control the temperature of data center rooms. Data center rooms may house computer equipment, such as servers, networking gear, storage systems, and the like, that generate heat. The heat produced by this computer equipment must be removed from the room in order to avoid raising the temperature of the computer equipment above an undesirable level. The removal of this heat can be accomplished by directing cooled air from the data center room over the computer equipment in order to remove the generated heat from the computer equipment, then re-cooling the heated air to maintain a flow of cooled air. Air conditioning systems capable of performing this function within a relatively small space and in an efficient manner continue to be welcome additions to the art in data center room and other applications.